[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Otfried Cheong]

Frank Hoffmann wrote:
> Let me ask you then: How can it be that the Hepburn romanization
> system for Japanese has worked so well for the past 120 years for
> Japan? It uses macrons over o and u, not present in standard Latin
> fonts either. Japanese have passports too and may once in a while
> order books at Amazon.com or use a Visa card to do shopping. I
> seriously do not know the answer, but my best hunch would be that 
> those "extra" accents would simply be left out whenever it is 
> anticipated that they might create problems with American or other 
> international services such as postal delivery or order systems.

I think there are three factors:

1) Japanese learn how to romanize properly in school.  This is of course
made easier by the fact that writing in Romaji is a popular input method
for computers as well.  I've seen Japanese write entire long emails in
Romaji because they used a computer where no Japanese input method or
fonts were available.  Koreans would rather write in English, no matter
how poor it is, than try to communicate in romanized Korean.

2) There is usually little loss of information when the macron is left
out. The Tokyo city website is http://www.metro.tokyo.jp, with no fear
of confusion.

When people can't handle diacritics, their first impulse is to simply
omit it, and often that is fine.   I've exchanged many emails in French
without diacritics before they were easily available in email clients,
and while they are slightly harder to read, no information is lost.
Munchen, Koln, and Zurich are still recognizable city names.

But this simply doesn't work for the McC-R romanization of Korean.  Is
Chongju 청주, 종주, 총주, 정주, 청추, or what?

3)  There is a well-known widely used alternative to macrons.  When
macrons are not available and one wants to make sure that no information
is lost, Japanese write Romaji as they would write Kana, as in "TOUKYOU"
for 東京.  The JR website (www.jr-odekake.net) actually allows you to
use Romaji, but you have to write "TOUKYO" - "TOKYO" will not work.


The lesson?  I think what Korea would have needed in 1999 was an
acceptable way of writing McC-R without diacritics, _plus_ proper
education of Koreans in romanizing (including the fact that omitting
diacritics is evil).

> You further write:
>>> In my opinion, the fact that Koreanists in 1999 were so adamant
>>> that this was all a technical issue that (a) was already solved,
>>> or (b) would be solved shortly, or (c) would be solved in due
>>> course, was the main reason that their input was greatly ignored
>>> - every Korean who had used an overseas web site knew better, and
>>> they were just making up their own romanization on the spot.
> 
> This opinion is based on what information? Does anyone have an
> indication to think that this played any role in the decision making
> process? (I very much doubt it did.)

This opinion is entirely based on my subjective impressions as a silent
observer of the process on this list and in the Korean press.

At the time, many Koreanists expressed the opinion that McC-R was
perfect, that the technical issues were either already solved or would
be solved shortly, that there was no need to change anything, and that
there was therefore not even a need for discussion.  Since the RR
Committee started out with the premise to create a diacritics-free
romanization of Korean, their voices were ignored, and they had no
influence on the decision.

I believe that if Koreanists had pushed to allow alternate spellings for
the diacritics in McC-R, the result might have been different.

As I said earlier, I would have suggested to simply allow "eo" and "eu"
for 어 and 으, and to replace the apostrophe by 'h'.  The latter looks
ugly, but according to Wikipedia, that is actually what North Korea
uses.  Is that true?  I've never seen the spelling Phyŏngyang anywhere.

But that was 10 years ago. Switching the romanization system again now
would be foolish, especially considering how widely accepted the RR has
become by Koreans.  Who knows, perhaps they would be able to write
emails in RR in the not-so-far future.

In any case, my point is that any language needs a way of being
romanized without diacritics.  It doesn't need to be the official
romanized spelling, just a standardized alternate spelling for the 
situations where diacritics are not available.  Korean before 2000 was 
the only language I know that didn't have this, and so people had to 
make up their own romanizations.  It was an untenable situation.

Ross King wrote (about the breves):
> They do indeed have magical powers -- they render unambiguously and
> without resorting to clumsy digraphs vowels that the Korean sound
> system insists be distinguished and that otherwise would go
> undistinguished in roman script. They signal, through their unitary
> unigraphicity, that a single vowel is being represented -- something
> that Seong-su or Seung-mi from Incheon cannot do with the new system.

The funny thing is that Seong-su and Seung-mi wouldn't in their dreams 
consider to spell their names as Sŏng-su and Sŭng-mi.  Several years 
ago, they would probably have used Sung-soo and Seung-mee, but now there 
is a pretty good chance that they would go for - guess - Seong-su and 
Seung-mi.  If Prof. King wanted to demonstrate the success of the RR, 
this would be pretty good argument! :-)

Best wishes,
  Otfried